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The Chemistry of a 90+ Wine

One day last September while Leo McCloskey was driving to the Chappellet winery in Napa Valley, he telephoned a client in the neighboring valley of Sonoma. "I'm looking at your metrics," McCloskey said. "They're pretty beefy. If you have that at midferm, you're already there. You need 50 percent as a 4; I think drain-down-sweet is the name of the game this year. Let's do what they do at Lafite -- come out shy of tannin, and we'll add tannin. I want to encourage you to move more aggressively than you normally would."

He listened for a few seconds. "You're golden," McCloskey said. "Beautiful -- you got a statue in the quad. Hey, I gotta fly." He ended the call and turned to me. "If you're in Sonoma, you have to rearrange Mother Nature to match the beauty of Napa and Bordeaux," he said. "Napa cabernet is the only New World wine ruler that's being used internationally. Sonoma is an also-ran."

McCloskey steered onto the Silverado Trail, entering into Stags Leap, the area that produced the cabernet sauvignon that won a famous Paris tasting in 1976, heralding the international arrival of California wine. "They picked too early," McCloskey said, gazing at acres of grapeless vines on both sides of the road. "We have a weekly online bulletin that tells people when to pick. On Sept. 13 we said not to, and people who picked anyway drained down at 87.1."

McCloskey could say this because his company, Enologix, takes grape samples from clients and extracts the juice to measure some of its chemical compounds. Then, using software developed by McCloskey, Enologix compares the chemistry of the projected wines with that of a benchmark example. The outcome is a score on a 100-point scale, analogous -- not coincidentally -- to those employed by critics like Robert Parker of The Wine Advocate and James Laube of Wine Spectator. McCloskey boasted that his "thinking is in tune with Parker, Laube and Helen Turley" -- the latter a California winemaker notorious for favoring big, fruity, intense wines.

Not everyone shares this taste, however. Many oenophiles argue that -- owing especially to the influence of Parker, who has been called the planet's most powerful critic of any kind, in any field -- wines all over the world have become more and more homogenous. The jammy, oaky international style is largely free of the tannins that mellow and lend flavor as a wine ages but can make it taste bitter or astringent when young. Yet these wines often lack a sense of terroir, or regional distinctiveness, celebrated by so many wine aficionados. Parker's most lamented impact is his popularization of the 100-point scale that is now employed by most wine magazines. The so-called Score has been described as America's main contribution to the wine business: a democratic, no-nonsense way of jettisoning the elitist jargon that veils quality from the consumer. It is also maligned for turning wine buyers into mindless puppets and vintners into sycophants seeking the favor of King Parker and King Laube.

But Leo McCloskey is unfazed. "The wine world is so big today that without ratings it would be chaos," he says. "The consumer doesn't need to know about terroir. He just wants to know whether a wine is worth $28 or whatever he's paying for it."

In the 15 years since McCloskey went into business for himself as a wine consultant, the number of California wineries has increased from 800 to 1,700, roughly speaking. The market share of foreign-made wines in the United States has doubled over the same period. With so many wineries now under the bottom-line control of corporations -- Constellation, Bronco, Beringer Blass, Brown-Forman, Kendall-Jackson, Diageo, the Wine Group and the longtime kingpin, E. & J. Gallo -- it is easy to see the appeal of Enologix, with its promise of "metrics that assist winemakers in . . . boosting average national critics' scores." But McCloskey doesn't stop there. He insists that high-scoring wines can, through chemical analysis, be scientifically proved to be the best wines on the market. In other words, there is accounting for taste. The low-slung Enologix offices are situated in a mini-business-park in the town of Sonoma. When I visited McCloskey there, he said that he has a database containing records of 70,000 wines, including information about soil, climate, prices, winemaking techniques, grape-growing practices and critical scores. While traditional wine science focuses mainly on primary chemicals -- things like sugar, alcohol and acidity, which determine whether a wine meets basic standards of acceptability -- McCloskey looks at secondary chemicals (like terpenes, phenols and anthocyanins), which, in affecting more nuanced characteristics like texture, aroma, taste and color, are more closely associated with quality.

To analyze an individual wine, Enologix runs a sample through a liquid chromatograph (and for white wine, a mass spectrometer) to separate and measure chemical compounds. McCloskey says he has identified about 100 that can affect a person's response; to compute a wine's "quality index," the ratios -- not just the amounts -- of these compounds to one another are compared with those of bottled wines previously judged and scored by groups of vintners, growers, owners and critics. McCloskey publishes his findings in his magazine, Global Vintage Quarterly, alongside a separate National Critics' Score, which represents an average rating compiled from five publications: Wine Spectator, The Wine Advocate, Wine Enthusiast, Stephen Tanzer's International Wine Cellar and Connoisseurs' Guide to California Wine.

Enologix divides wine into four categories. For reds, Style 1 is pale in color and low in tannin, like most pinot noir or French Burgundy; Style 2 is also pale, but higher in tannin, like Italian Barolo; Style 3 is dark and tannic, like a great many cabernet sauvignons and first-growth Bordeaux; Style 4 is similarly dark but only moderately tannic. This last category, McCloskey told me, represents "the vast majority of successful, flagship mainstream wines, the most elegant and popular wines in the world."

Fermentation, the foundation of winemaking, occurs when yeast converts grape sugar into alcohol. Harvesting fruit late yields more intense flavor, though higher sugars result in higher alcohol levels; "draining down sweet" -- separating the juice in a fermentation tank from its crushed grape skins before all the sugar has been transformed -- means that less harsh-tasting tannin will find its way into the wine, with the side effect that it may age less well. According to McCloskey, these techniques (guided by Enologix chemistry and his winemaking expertise) can yield the Style 4 qualities -- rich, concentrated flavor and a soft, velvety sensation in the mouth -- that contemporary critics value most.

McCloskey claims that by using his system and the 100-point scale, winemakers can predict their own average critical scores within two and a half points with 95 percent accuracy (one and a half points with 80 percent accuracy). He says that the typical winery signing up with Enologix realizes a five-point rise over its previous years' average scores for red wines -- six for white. McCloskey's emphasis is on the luxury cabernet market in which wineries can afford Enologix's average annual service fee of $20,000. The company's revenues (which vary between $1 million and $1.4 million) flow from such prestigious names as Beaulieu, Benziger, Diamond Creek, Merry Edwards, Niebaum-Coppola, Ridge, St. Francis and Sebastiani. According to McCloskey, 39 Enologix wines scored 90 points or higher in a recent issue of The Wine Advocate.

The Chappellet winery is hidden in a grove of oaks backed by open slopes of grapevines, high among the rugged hills on Napa Valley's eastern edge. Founded in 1968 by Donn and Molly Chappellet, the company won early acclaim for its cabernet sauvignon, but as consumer tastes shifted toward softer textures and juicier fruit, it acquired the aura of a has-been. To turn things around, the owners hired a young winemaker, Phillip Titus, in 1990. He began working with Enologix in 1996, and in 2004 Connoisseurs' Guide chose a Chappellet cabernet as the Wine of the Year.

After parking the car and entering the winery's cavernous interior, we were greeted by Titus, now 49, who drew a foaming sample of merlot from a stainless-steel fermentation tank. As we tasted the wine, Titus recited its levels of tannin and complex anthocyanins -- in parts per million -- from the Enologix chemical report. "In my tasting group, they can't speak this language," Titus said. "Unless you're an Enologix client, you don't talk about complex anthocyanins."

Soon we were joined by two more of McCloskey's clients, Sam Spencer and Wendy Roloson, who were making 5,000 cases of wine at Chappellet. With the first fruit he had picked, Spencer had pressed the wine off its skins after fermentation was finished. "But when we looked at the results," McCloskey said, "quality was low because tannin was high."

"I wasn't able to drain down into a Style 4," Spencer confirmed.

"Your grapes are growing at Style 3," McCloskey told him. "That's the pitch your terroir is throwing you. But Parker, Laube and the consumer are at Style 4, so you need to ask yourself, How can I get my wine stylistically in the right ballpark?"

The answer was that Spencer would have to press his remaining grapes earlier this time and aim to produce a successful product through blending. "You need to be so low in tannin that you're going to feel really uncomfortable," McCloskey warned.

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Later, Spencer told me that Enologix at first "seemed like a luxury. It wasn't exactly forthcoming about how the system works -- you have to sign a nondisclosure agreement to see how the metrics add up, and I wasn't convinced. But now I think it's a tool that every carpenter ought to have."

Not all of McCloskey's clients are so complimentary. Several I spoke to declined to be quoted, apparently owing to a fear that being identified with Enologix would suggest that they have gone over to the dark side and are chasing the Score. (McCloskey calls this "the cover-up," when winemakers refuse to acknowledge their use of modern technologies at odds with romantic marketing images.)

Joel Peterson, co-founder and general manager of Ravenswood (a noted zinfandel winery where I once worked), told me that after Ravenswood's brief experience with Enologix, he thought the company provided information only for making one style of wine. "It's a very narrow definition of taste," Peterson says. "Part of the charm and beauty of wine is its idiosyncrasy, but when everybody tries to hit the same sweet spot, it's like making soda pop." And when all wines taste alike, he says, "as a consumer you have to ask what you're paying for."

Although McCloskey is fond of proclaiming that "the consumer is king," sales don't figure into the Enologix Index. In lieu of formal studies or statistics, McCloskey (like most of the rest of the wine industry) accepts the axiom that buyers obey critics, whether or not the average consumer's palate agrees with that of the average wine writer. The common objection to the Score is that wine is too complex a beverage to be summed up in a single number. The way in which someone responds to a wine depends on myriad variables: stylistic preference, mood, the accompanying food and the state of the wine itself after shipping and storing and aging -- not to mention the prejudices and expectations that attend a wine's reputation and price. For the same reason that a thundering symphony or screaming guitar solo may not make the best dinner music, wines that do poorly in competitive tastings sometimes fare better with meals than those attention-grabbing ones that impress judges in isolation. Hence, by keying his chemical evaluation system to critical scores, McCloskey makes the (not uncommon) assumption that intensity is tantamount to quality, when it's often equivalent only to extravagance.

"The prevailing critics can't distinguish real quality," says Randall Grahm, the winemaker at Bonny Doon Vineyards (like Ravenswood, a former Parker favorite that fell from grace as it grew). "They're easily fooled by fakery because the only thing they're looking for is concentration. That probably can be correlated with chemistry -- but I would argue that while it can be an indicator of quality, it's not the only one. It doesn't speak to balance, for example."

Roger Boulton, a professor in the department of viticulture and oenology at the University of California, Davis, is critical of the fact that Enologix's analytical methods aren't available for outsiders to verify. "If Leo is so sure about these things," Boulton asked me, "why are they hidden?" Others agree, complaining that McCloskey's proprietary system constitutes a "black box" impervious to academic and professional scrutiny.

"I'm not in the tenure-track business," McCloskey retorts. "I followed the academic rules and published papers for a while. I found it was insanely slow. If you walked up to Steve Jobs and asked him to reveal everything, he'd say, 'Get out of my face."' McCloskey, interestingly enough, grew up in San Francisco and Cupertino, Calif., the home of Jobs and Apple Computer. Upon graduating from Oregon State in 1971 with a degree in general science, he returned home and got a job painting barrels with mildicide at nearby Ridge Vineyards; within a year, he had taken over the winery's lab -- such as it was -- and by the time he was 25 had published new methods for measuring alcohol and malolactic fermentation (both now essential to wine analysis). In 1976 he helped to found Felton-Empire, a winery whose first vintage riesling won the Sweepstakes Award at the Los Angeles County Fair.

Paul Draper, the now celebrated vintner who arrived at Ridge shortly before McCloskey, recalls that Charlie Rosen -- one of the winery's founders and then head of artificial intelligence at the Stanford Research Institute -- considered McCloskey a genius, and Maynard Amerine, a noted U.C. Davis professor who helped to classify California's wine regions by climate, suggested that McCloskey get a doctorate at Davis with the aim of joining the faculty. But Rosen and Carl Djerassi, a Ridge investor and the inventor of the birth-control pill, advised McCloskey to study "things like chemistry and mathematics, which actually have principles," McCloskey says. "Enology is more like a social science." While remaining a paid consultant at Ridge, McCloskey attended U.C. Santa Cruz, and there he met his future wife, Susanne Arrhenius, a Swedish-born grad student whose lineage included two Nobel laureates in chemistry. Following Arrhenius into the field of chemical ecology, which analyzes the relationships between organisms and their environments, McCloskey completed his Ph.D. while continuing to consult with private clients and serve as president of Felton-Empire.

"Chemical ecology says that a wine's flavor, color and fragrance are expressions of its ecosystem," McCloskey told me. "Wine scientists thought grapes were more complicated than any other plant system. But we found out that Vitis vinifera produces a relatively simple list of flavors. Grapes are really rather primitive."

Soon after McCloskey left U.C. Santa Cruz, Felton-Empire was sold. Along the way, he noticed that the U.S. wine industry was becoming more businesslike and less entrepreneurial. "Critics were starting to control the value chain that went from the winery to the distributor to the retailer and restaurateur to the consumer," McCloskey says. "By 1990 everybody was discrediting the Score, but I saw that the critics were going to win because Americans wanted to reduce their risk of purchase and winemakers weren't filling the information void."

That year, 1990, McCloskey met with Dick Graff, then chairman of the Chalone Wine Group. McCloskey told him that although winemakers always seemed surprised when their efforts didn't pan out, chemistry could actually predict critical performance. Graff arranged for McCloskey to taste Chalone wines with all the company's vintners, after which McCloskey assembled the results and analyzed the wines' chemistry. Later the winemakers were presented with 12 wines, and asked to rank the 6 best and 6 worst. While others tallied the votes, McCloskey produced a sealed envelope containing his chemically based predictions: he correctly guessed the group's Top 3 and Bottom 3 choices, in the correct order.

After that, Graff introduced McCloskey to the owners of Château Lafite Rothschild, the famous first-growth Bordeaux estate that had a financial interest in Chalone. When McCloskey analyzed the chemistry of Lafite's vintages from the previous decade, his quality index exactly mirrored their economic performance. McCloskey continued to work with Lafite for the next four years, over which time he gained a dozen more clients. In 1993 he trademarked the name Enologix. A week and a half after the meeting at Chappellet, Sam Spencer visited the Enologix offices with samples of wine he had pressed according to McCloskey's instructions. Studying its numbers, McCloskey said, "That's a home run."

"I literally baby-sat the fermenter," Spencer said.

Later, in the privacy of his office, McCloskey told me, "My goal is to make my customers self-sufficient so that metrics alone can solve all their problems." Toward that end, he is now creating a thousand proprietary documents that will include all of his winemaking knowledge. Ultimately, he said, "I'll be replaced by customer-management software."

And if McCloskey has his way, descriptions of a wine's terroir will be replaced by reports on its levels of tannin and complex anthocyanin.

David Darlington is the author of "Zin: The History and Mystery of Zinfandel" (originally published as "Angels' Visits"), among other books, and writes the Short Finish column for Wine & Spirits magazine.